TUNIS: Migration activists are sounding the alarm this week about mass expulsions and arbitrary arrests in Tunisia, where authorities are seeing more migrants arrive for attempted Mediterranean crossings from the North African nation to Europe.
The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights on Monday accused the government of waging a campaign of repression against migrants at the expense of humanitarian concerns, “to satisfy European blackmail and ensure a steady stream of financial and logistical support.”
It said in a statement that witness accounts indicated the situation had become particularly dire around Tunisia’s borders with Libya and Algeria as well as around the country’s second most populous city, Sfax, a common stopover point for migrants aiming to cross the Mediterranean.
The nongovernmental organization said that migrants in Sfax, which is 117 miles (188 kilometers) from the Italian Island of Lampedusa, regularly experience arbitrary arrests and violence. Many have their property destroyed.
Such treatment hasn’t been limited to migrants who enter Tunisia without authorization and has extended to refugees, students, and workers, the group said.
It said it had received frequent reports of mass expulsions across the Algerian and Libyan borders. In Algeria, that has included migrants being deported into the desert regardless of weather conditions. In war-torn Libya, deportations often lead to migrants ending up in detention centers run by armed groups.
Tunisian officials have said small groups of migrants have been pushed back across the country’s desert borders but disputed reports of systemic abuse and expulsions.
The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights implored the government to end the deportations, provide migrants safe haven and update laws to allow those without papers to obtain some sort of legal status.
“Sovereignty is not achieved by intimidating vulnerable groups and resorting to outdated laws and discriminatory circulars, but rather by initiating national policies that guarantee dignity, rights and freedoms for all humans,” it said.
Tunisia faces increased scrutiny over how it deals with migrants. More than 97,000 people crossed the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Italy in 2023, according to UNHCR. Tunisian migration groups estimate there are between 20,000 and 50,000 sub-Saharan migrants in the country.
Tunisian authorities receive financial assistance from Europe to help police borders. The country brokered a $1 billion euro ($1.1 billion) aid agreement in July that included a pledge of 105 million euros ($110 million) earmarked for migration.
Despite the aid, President Kais Saied has insisted that Tunisia will not become Europe’s “border guard” or accept migrants that European politicians, including ascendant right-wing leaders, don’t want.
Saied last year faced allegations of racism after calling the presence of sub-Saharan African migrants part of a “criminal plan to change the demographic makeup of the country.”
Tunisian group accuses authorities of mass expulsions of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa
Tunisian group accuses authorities of mass expulsions of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa
Slashed US aid showing impact, as Congress codifies cuts
- Nearly 500 metric tons of high-nutrition biscuits, meant to keep alive malnourished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, were incinerated after expiration in Dubai
- But State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce took a more defiant tone on Thursday, saying the biscuits represented less than one percent of US global food aid
WASHINGTON, US: The United States’ destruction of a warehouse worth of emergency food that had spoiled has drawn outrage, but lawmakers and aid workers say it is only one effect of President Donald Trump’s abrupt slashing of foreign assistance.
The Senate early Thursday approved nearly $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid as well as public broadcasting, formalizing a radical overhaul of spending that Trump first imposed with strokes of his pen on taking office nearly six months ago.
US officials confirmed that nearly 500 metric tons of high-nutrition biscuits, meant to keep alive malnourished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, were incinerated after they passed their expiration date in a warehouse in Dubai.
Lawmakers of the rival Democratic Party said they had warned about the expiring food since March. Senator Tim Kaine said that the inaction in feeding children “really exposes the soul” of the Trump administration.
Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management, acknowledged to Kaine that blame lay with the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was merged into the State Department after drastic cuts.
“I think that this was just a casualty of the shutdown of USAID,” Rigas said Wednesday.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, however, took a more defiant tone Thursday, saying the biscuits represented less than one percent of US global food aid, using figures that appeared to come from before Trump’s cutbacks.
“We will not be lectured about the issue of food aid or what we do for the rest of the world,” she said.
The Atlantic magazine, which first reported the episode, said that the United States bought the biscuits near the end of Biden administration for around $800,000 and that the Trump administration’s burning of the food was costing taxpayers another $130,000.
For aid workers, the biscuit debacle was just one example of how drastic and sudden cuts have aggravated the impact of the aid shutdown.
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president for global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, said that large infrastructure projects were shut down immediately, without regard to how to finish them.
“This really was yanking the rug out, or turning the the spigot off, overnight,” she said.
She pointed to the termination of a USAID-backed Mercy Corps project to improve water and sanitation in the turbulent east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Work began in 2020 and was scheduled to end in September 2027.
“Infrastructure projects are not things where 75 percent is ok. It’s either done or it’s not,” she said.
The House of Representatives is expected late Thursday to finalize the end of funding for what White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called “$9 billion worth of crap.”
It includes ending all $437 million the United States would have given to several UN bodies including the children’s agency UNICEF and the UN Development Programme. It also pulls $2.5 billion from development assistance.
Under pressure from moderate Republicans, the package backs off from ending PEPFAR, the anti-HIV/AIDS initiative credited with saving 25 million lives since it was launched by former president George W. Bush more than two decades ago.
Republicans and the Trump-launched Department of Government Efficiency, initially led by tycoon Elon Musk, have pointed to projects they argue do not advance US interests.
“We can’t fund transgender operas in Peru with US taxpayer dollars,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, an apparent reference to a US grant under the Biden administration for the staging of an opera in Colombia that featured a transgender protagonist.
The aid cuts come a week after the State Department laid off more than 1,300 employees as Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended or merged several offices, including those on climate change, refugees and human rights.
Rubio called it a “very deliberate step to reorganize the State Department to be more efficient and more focused.”
Senate Democrats issued a scathing report that accused the Trump administration of ceding global leadership to China, which has been increasing spending on diplomacy and disseminating its worldview.
The rescissions vote “will be met with cheers in Beijing, which is already celebrating America’s retreat from the world under President Trump,” said Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
North Korea bars foreign tourists from new seaside resort
- The Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone appears to be lined with high-rise hotels and waterparks
- State media previously said visits to Wonsan by Russian tour groups were expected in the coming months
SEOUL: North Korea has barred foreigners from a newly opened beach resort, the country’s tourism administration said this week, just days after Russia’s top diplomat visited the area.
The sprawling seaside resort on its east coast, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s pet project, opened to domestic visitors earlier this month with great fanfare in state-run media.
Dubbed “North Korea’s Waikiki” by South Korean media, the Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone appears to be lined with high-rise hotels and waterparks, and can purportedly accommodate some 20,000 people.
State media previously said visits to Wonsan by Russian tour groups were expected in the coming months.
But following Lavrov’s visit, the North’s National Tourism Administration said “foreign tourists are temporarily not being accepted” without giving further details, in a statement posted on an official website this week.
Kim showed a keen interest in developing North Korea’s tourism industry during his early years in power, analysts have said, and the coastal resort area was a particular focus.
He said ahead of the opening of the beach resort that the construction of the site would go down as “one of the greatest successes this year” and that the North would build more large-scale tourist zones “in the shortest time possible.”
The North last year permitted Russian tourists to return for the first time since the pandemic and Western tour operators briefly returned in February this year.
Seoul’s unification ministry, however, said that it expected international tourism to the new resort was “likely to remain small in scale” given the limited capacity of available flights.
Kim held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Wonsan last week where he offered Moscow his full and “unconditional” support for its war in Ukraine, KCNA reported.
Lavrov reportedly hailed the seaside project as a “good tourist attraction,” adding it would become popular among both local and Russian visitors looking for new destinations.
Ahead of Lavrov’s recent visit, Russia announced that it would begin twice-a-week flights between Moscow and Pyongyang.
Oil Updates — crude extends gain on Iraq outages, tight market supports
SINGAPORE: Oil prices extended gains on Friday, underpinned by supply concerns following drone attacks on northern Iraqi oilfields and tight market fundamentals amid healthy summer demand.
Brent crude futures climbed 29 cents, or 0.40 percent, to $69.81 a barrel as of 7:51 a.m. Saudi time, US West Texas Intermediate crude futures advanced 27 cents, or 0.42 percent, to $67.81 a barrel.
Four days of drone attacks on oilfields in Iraqi Kurdistan that shut down half the region’s output have supported prices, pushing both contracts up $1 on Thursday.
Additionally, seasonal travel demand has propped up the market. In the first two weeks of July, global oil demand has averaged 105.2 million barrels per day, up by 600,000 bpd from a year earlier and largely in line with forecast, JPMorgan analysts said in a research note.
“Crude prices have been broadly stable this week, with no significant moves as the impact of OPEC+ supply increases has been offset by strong seasonal demand in the US,” said LSEG’s analyst Anh Pham.
US crude inventories fell a larger-than-expected last week as exports rose, government data on Wednesday showed.
Demand in Asia also firmed as refineries came back from maintenance amid peak seasonal demand.
Near-term oil fundamentals are likely to remain supportive, with the market set to remain fairly tight through this quarter, before becoming better supplied from the last three months of the year, ING analysts said in a note on Friday.
Still, the uncertainty around US tariff policy, which appears unlikely to be settled until after August 1, is weighing on the market. Plans by major oil producers to remove output cuts will also add to supply as the seasonal Northern Hemisphere summer demand ends. For this week, both Brent and WTI were down more than 1 percent.
Oil output in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region has been slashed from about 280,000 bpd to between 140,000 bpd and 150,000 bpd, two energy officials said.
Officials pointed to Iran-backed militias as the likely source of attacks this week on the region’s oilfields, although no group has claimed responsibility.
Despite the attack, Iraq’s federal government said on Thursday that Iraqi Kurdistan will resume oil exports through a pipeline to Turkiye after a two-year halt.
Myanmar junta offers cash rewards to anti-coup defectors
- The Southeast Asian country has been consumed by civil war since a 2021 coup
- Embattled junta faces an array of pro-democracy guerillas and ethnic armed rebels
YANGON: Myanmar’s junta said Friday it is offering cash rewards to fighters willing to desert armed groups defying its rule and “return to the legal fold” ahead of a slated election.
The Southeast Asian country has been consumed by civil war since a 2021 coup, with the embattled junta facing an array of pro-democracy guerillas and ethnic armed rebels.
After suffering major battlefield reverses, the military has touted elections around the end of the year as a pathway to peace – plans denounced as a sham by opposition groups and international monitors.
State media The Global New Light of Myanmar said Friday “individuals who returned to the legal fold with arms and ammunition are being offered specific cash rewards.”
The junta mouthpiece did not specify how much cash it is offering, but said 14 anti-coup fighters had surrendered since it issued a statement pledging to “welcome” defectors two weeks ago.
“These individuals chose to abandon the path of armed struggle due to their desire to live peacefully within the framework of the law,” the newspaper said.
The surrendered fighters included 12 men and two women, it added.
Nine were members of ethnic armed groups, while five were from the pro-democracy “People’s Defense Forces” – formed after the military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected civilian government four years ago.
The junta’s offer of a gilded olive branch matches a tactic used by its opponents – who have previously tried to tempt military deserters with cash rewards.
The “National Unity Government,” a self-proclaimed administration in exile dominated by ousted lawmakers, has called the junta’s call for cooperation “a strategy filled with deception aimed at legitimizing their power-consolidating sham election.”
The best TV shows of the year so far
- Need a summertime streaming binge? Here’s what you should have seen so far in 2025
‘Adolescence’
This harrowing drama, created by actor Stephen Graham (who also stars) and writer Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, will surely clean up at the next round of major awards. The story of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, accused of the murder of a schoolmate, and his family was practically flawless in every aspect, from the excellent ensemble cast (including breakout star Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie) to the extraordinary technical skill (each of its four episodes was shot in a single take). “The balletic production processes that must have been involved are simply staggering, but they suck the audience in and refuse to let them go, demanding we share in every uncomfortable second,” our reviewer wrote. “‘Adolescence’ may be one of the most upsetting shows released this year — at times, it’s excruciating — but it is also a remarkable work of art.”
‘Severance’ S2
The wonderfully weird world of Apple’s sci-fi comedy-drama was expanded far beyond the walls of the Lumon offices in season two, as Mark S (Adam Scott) and his team of data refiners dealt with the fallout from their successful, if brief, escape from their ‘severed’ floor — where work and out-of-work memories and personalities are controlled and delineated by a chip embedded in their brains — and alert the outside world to the cruelties of their working conditions. Season two had that same blend of surreal silliness and nightmarish anxiety that made the show so popular — as our reviewer said: “Creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller waste no time in rediscovering the subtle blend of tangible oddness and sinister dystopian creepiness that made the first season such an uncomfortable joy.” “Severance” remains smart, thought-provoking, entertaining, and utterly absorbing.
‘Mo’ S2
The second season of Mo Amer’s semi-autobiographical comedy drama — in which he plays Mo Najjar, a Kuwait-born Palestinian refugee living in Houston, Texas, with his mother Yusra (the superb Farah Bsieso), and his older brother Sameer (Omar Elba), who’ve been waiting more than two decades to have their asylum case heard — proved that the success of season one was no fluke. Amer, our reviewer wrote, continued to explore “incredibly complex and divisive topics — family, religion, imbalance of power, exile, mental health, parenthood, multiculturalism and much more — with an artful lightness of touch, without ever taking them lightly.” The finale — in which the family finally head to Palestine for the first time in more than 20 years — was a triumph of storytelling.
‘Black Mirror’ S7
Charlie Brooker’s near-future-set sci-fi anthology series — which has, since its inception, proven frighteningly prophetic — continued to explore familiar themes in its seventh season, most especially the terrifying potential technology has to reshape our existence. But it did so with a slightly softer touch that suggests Brooker’s cynicism is mellowing just a little — and it was the richer for it. It doesn’t hurt that some fine actors continue to line up to feature in the show — this season saw Rashida Jones, Awkwafina, Peter Capaldi, Paul Giamatti, Emma Corrin, Issa Rae, Patsy Ferran and many more on the roster. And, of course, there was that sequel — the first in the show’s history — to a “Black Mirror” classic: season four’s “USS Callister.”
‘Andor’ S2
It seems a shame that what was by far the strongest of the many TV spinoffs from “Star Wars” was just two seasons long, but maybe that limitation was the reason why it was the strongest: it cut out the indulgent exposition. We already knew what was coming — at least, if you’d seen “Rogue One” you did, and if you hadn’t seen it then why on earth were you watching a “Star Wars” spinoff? Its story of a population rising up against the erosion of their rights was both convincing and timely. “With ‘Andor,’ (creator Tony) Gilroy and (star Diego) Luna have truly set the gold standard for what future “Star Wars” can be,” our reviewer wrote. “Not just a space opera, but real stories of transformation and beauty.”
‘The Studio’
Apple’s star-studded comedy about a newly appointed Hollywood studio head (Matt Remick, played by Seth Grogan), who believes himself to be a supporter of great art, but quickly discovers that he’ll have to park his principles and chase the money, was as sharp a satire as you could wish to see. “Even though “The Studio” is a TV show about the movie business, it still manages to skewer both industries,” our reviewer wrote. “At every turn, Remick is confronted by the inherent silliness of the movie business, and we get to watch it in a series of episodic, bingeable installments, each bursting with cameos and a satirical swipe at everything from celebrity culture to pretentious auteurs.”
